Powerhouse Of The CellDi Ancient & New

This is the first Syriac reader for the New Testament. It guides the reader through the Syriac New Testament Peshitta, glossing the uncommon words and parsing difficult word forms. It is designed for two groups of people. First, for students learning Syriac after a years’ worth of study this series provides the material to grow in reading ability f…

Lindsey Mazurek joins me in the Lesche to discuss Isis worship during the Roman Empire, and how it intersected with and contributed to constructions of Greek identity. Ancient texts Apuleius, Metamorphoses (esp. Book 11) Plutarch, Isis and Osiris Also mentioned Barrett, Caitlin E. (2019) Domesticating Empire: Egyptian Landscapes in Pompeian Gardens…

Ellen, while currently working at the school, grew up in the parish and has years of youth ministry under her belt. She joins the podcast to share some of her experience, expertise and her love of all things true and beautiful.

The stories that made the Ancient Egypt headlines over the third week of May Repatriated Artefacts GEM Opening Invites Sent Out Hetepheres' Silver Bracelets New Visa-On-Arrival Pilot These news stories are taken from various public internet sources including: http://english.ahram.org.eg/Portal/9/Heritage.aspx https://egyptianstreets.com/tag/cairo/ …

Tyler Neill discusses the new platform Pāṇḍitya, an online graph visualization tool illustrating connections between works and authors in the Pandit Prosopographical Database of Indic Texts. It also facilitates exploration of the Sanskrit E-Text Inventory (SETI) as an overlay on the Pandit network. Tyler's blog "Sanskrit and Tech with Tyler" is her…

Early in her career, Elaine Pagels changed our understanding of the origins of Christianity with her work in The Gnostic Gospels. Now, in the culmination of a decades-long career, she explores the biggest subject of all, Jesus. In Miracles and Wonder:The Historical Mystery of Jesus (Doubleday, 2025) she sets out to discover how a poor young Jewish …

A richly illustrated account of how premodern botanical illustrations document evolving knowledge about plants and the ways they were studied in the past. Botanical Icons: Critical Practices of Illustration in the Premodern Mediterranean (U Chicago Press, 2024) traces the history of botanical illustration in the Mediterranean from antiquity to the …

The stories that made the Ancient Egypt headlines over the first weeks of May GEM Talks Zahi Hawass and 2025 Luxor Mummification Museum Tutankhamun Transfers Artefacts to GEM International Museum Day These news stories are taken from various public internet sources including: http://english.ahram.org.eg/Portal/9/Heritage.aspx https://egyptianstreet…

The Mirror of Ornaments (Alaṅkāradappaṇō) defines and exemplifies 42 figures of speech or “ornaments” in 134 verses. It is the only surviving work of poetics in Prakrit, a literary language closely related to Sanskrit. It is one of the earliest representatives of the larger Indian discourse on poetics, and is especially closely linked to Bhāmaha’s …

Talk Amongst YourselvesDi Ancient & New

Sasha-Mae Eccleston joins me in the Lesche to discuss classicizing and chronopolitics in the contemporary United States. And yes, we talk about that Virgil quotation. Ancient texts Homer, Iliad Euripides & Seneca, Medea Virgil, Aeneid 9.447 (nulla dies umquam memori uos eximet aeuo) Also mentioned (selection) Modern creative works Eric Fischl, "Tum…

Garden of Egypt: Irrigation, Society, and the State in the Premodern Fayyūm (University of Michigan Press, 2024) is the first environmental history of Egypt’s Fayyūm depression. The book examines human relationships with flowing water from the 3rd century BCE to the 13th century CE. Until the arrival of modern perennial irrigation in the nineteenth…

The stories that made the Ancient Egypt headlines over the early days of May Replica Exhibition Opens in Mexico Nut and the Milky Way New Fortress Discovered in Sinai May's Museum Highlights These news stories are taken from various public internet sources including: http://english.ahram.org.eg/Portal/9/Heritage.aspx https://egyptianstreets.com/tag…

"In the beginning, God administrated." For as Donald Prudlo observes, "There can be no achievement without administration." In this book he seeks to restore the idea that while administration is necessary even in the institutional Church, holiness is not only possible for those charged with governance, but is a fulfillment and type of Christus Rect…

Both humorous and shocking, Miracula: Weird and Wonderful Stories of Ancient Greece and Rome (Reaktion, 2025) by Paul Crystal is filled with astonishing facts and stories drawn from ancient Greece and Rome that have rarely been retold in English. It explores ‘the incredible’ as presented by little-known classical writers like Callimachus and Phlego…

The institution of slavery permeated the ancient world, such that the realities of slavery and its long shadows pervade the New Testament and other early Christian texts. Yet enslavement remains an under-taught aspect of the context of the New Testament and early Christianity, leaving pastors, laypersons, and neophyte college students alike to fill…

He Never Shuts UpDi Ancient & New

The Babylonian Talmud and Late Antique Book Culture (Cambridge UP, 2023) argues that the Talmud must be read and understood in the broader context of late ancient discursive and material contexts of books, rhetoric, and technology. As Dr. Amsler’s work reveals, the structure and form of the Talmud point to knowledge and mastery of rhetorical traini…

Buckle your seatbelt and prepare to clutch your pearls! Walter Scheidel joins me in the Lesche to discuss his case for globalizing the study of ancient history -- and for killing off Classics as we know it. Scheidel is the author of What is Ancient History?, a new manifesto published by Princeton University Press. Mentioned Sheldon Pollock, "Future…

Star. Stjarna. Setareh. Thousands of miles apart, humans look up at the night sky and use the same word to describe what they see. Listen to these English, Icelandic, and Iranian words, and you can hear echoes of one of history's most unlikely, miraculous journeys. For all of these languages – and hundreds more – share a single ancient source. In a…

The stories that made the Ancient Egypt headlines over the last week of April Rameses III Found in Jordan GEM Closing For Finishing Touches Secret Messages on Luxor Obelisk On Top of the Pyramid in Shanghai Antiquities Documentation Centre These news stories are taken from various public internet sources including: http://english.ahram.org.eg/Porta…

Living With Risk in the Late Roman World (U Pennsylvania Press, 2025)explores the ever-present experiences of risk that characterized the daily existence of individuals, communities, and societies in the late Roman world (late third century CE through mid-sixth century CE). Recognizing the vital role of human agency, author Cam Grey bases his argum…

Plants, Politics and Empire in Ancient Rome (Cambridge University Press, 2022) by Dr. Annalisa Marzano investigates the cultural and political dimension of Roman arboriculture and the associated movement of plants from one corner of the empire to the other. It uses the convergent perspectives offered by textual and archaeological sources to sketch …

If you don't celebrate the Sacred Paschal Triduum, you are missing out! It's like Catholic Week par excellence! Because only Catholics celebrate it, and the deeper a Catholic gets into their faith, the more he is drawn to or into the Triduum and the more it it builds up his faith. Fr. Kowalczyk and Cosden recap the Catholicist and holiest of all we…

The stories that made the Ancient Egypt headlines over the third week of April Rameses and the Gold of the Pharaohs First World Capital of Culture, History, and Heritage Giza Plateau Development Prince's Tomb Discovered at Saqqara Tour Guide Training at GEM Link to tour guides training https://forms.office.com/r/4Jr8nymfNm These news stories are ta…

In The Nero-Antichrist: Founding and Fashioning a Paradigm (Cambridge UP, 2020), Shushma Malik reconstructs the means by which the emperor Nero came to be identified with the New Testament's antichrist. Malik surveys the first four Christian centuries to show how Nero mythology developed, often in ways that were much more positive than we might exp…

In 2012, Steve Green, billionaire and president of the Hobby Lobby chain of craft stores, announced a recent purchase of a Biblical artefact—a fragment of papyrus, just discovered, carrying lines from Paul's letter to the Romans, and dated to the second century CE. Noted scholar Roberta Mazza was stunned. When was this piece discovered, and how cou…

Brahmins and Kings: Royal Counsel in the Sanskrit Narrative Literatures (Oxford UP, 2025) examines some of the most well-known and widely circulated narratives in the history of Sanskrit literature, including the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, Visnusarman's famed animal stories (the Panchatantra), Somadeva's labyrinthine Ocean of Rivers of Stories (the…

OG MindfulnessDi Ancient & New

The city was one of the central and defining features of the world of the Greek and Roman Mediterranean. Challenging the idea that the ancient city 'declined and fell', Andrew Wallace-Hadrill argues that memories of the past enabled cities to adapt and remain relevant in the changing post-Roman world. In the new kingdoms in Italy, France and Spain …

Scarlett Kingsley joins me in the Lesche to discuss Herodotus' place in the intellectual milieu of the fifth century, the subject of her book Herodotus and the Presocratics: Inquiry and Intellectual Culture in the Fifth Century BCE. If you enjoy this episode, you might also like Episode 11 on The Sophists, with Josh Billings and Christopher Moore. …

This bonus episode is the live recording of the third part of the three part Teaching Mass series that Fr. K is doing as part of our Wednesday Ars Vivendi formation nights. He walks and talks through the parts of the Mass starting with the the Preface through the end of the Mass.

Syriac Lexis and Lexica: Compiling Ancient and Modern Vocabularies (Gorgias Press, 2024) publishes the papers presented at the round table on Syriac lexicology and lexicography held at the 13th Symposium Syriacum (Paris, 2022). An international group of scholars approaches this field from several new angles and shows how much remains to be done, fr…

The stories that made the Ancient Egypt headlines over the second week of April Nubian Women Used Head Straps The Clay Trays in Tutankhamun's Tomb The New Giza Plateau Entrance These news stories are taken from various public internet sources including: http://english.ahram.org.eg/Portal/9/Heritage.aspx https://egyptianstreets.com/tag/cairo/ http:/…

Who are you, how are you supposed to live, and what about happiness? Answers to age-old questions are offered in classic myths about heroes, gods, and monsters, and at the ballgame. In The Ancient Wisdom of Baseball (Greenleaf, 2025), author Christian Sheppard interweaves Homer’s epics with glorious stories from the green fields of America’s pastim…

What Is Love - Ch. 1-3Di Ancient & New

For a millennium and a half, India was a confident exporter of its diverse civilization, creating around it a vast empire of ideas. Indian art, religions, technology, astronomy, music, dance, literature, mathematics and mythology blazed a trail across the world, along a Golden Road that stretched from the Red Sea to the Pacific. In The Golden Road …

The beguiling ruins of Rome have a long history of allure. They first engaged the attention of later mediaeval tourists, just as they do today. The interest of travellers was captured in the Renaissance by artists, architects, topographers, antiquarians, archaeologists and writers. Once the ruins were seen to appeal to visitors, and to matter for t…

The stories that made the Ancient Egypt headlines over the first week of April Don't Climb the Monuments! 175000 Visitors Over Eid Toddler Finds Ancient Scarab New Discoveries at the Ramesseum These news stories are taken from various public internet sources including: http://english.ahram.org.eg/Portal/9/Heritage.aspx https://egyptianstreets.com/t…

Family Movie NightDi Ancient & New

This bonus episode is the live recording of the second part of the three part Teaching Mass series that Fr. K is doing as part of our Wednesday Ars Vivendi formation nights. He walks and talks through the parts of the Mass starting with the the Credo through the Orate Fratres (Pray Brethren), i.e., mainly the middle or "hinge" part of the Mass betw…

Daniel Mendelsohn joins me in the Lesche to discuss his new translation of Homer's Odyssey, out on April 9 with the University of Chicago Press. Daniel Mendelsohn's website Ancient texts Homer, Iliad and Odyssey Also mentioned Previous translations of the Odyssey by Richmond Lattimore, Robert Fitzgerald, and Emily Wilson (and Alexander Pope); also …

How do we best see and understand the art of late antiquity? One of the perceived challenges of so doing is that this is a period whose visual production has been defined as stylistically abstract and emotionally spiritual, and therefore elusive. But this is a perception which – in her path-breaking new book – Sarah Bassett boldly challenges, offer…

The stories that made the Ancient Egypt headlines over the last week of March Rameses II in Tokyo New Funerary Rituals of Tutankhamun Shepseskaf's Tomb in Saqqara Were Pyramids Tombs for all Classes? Egyptian Women at NMEC Sudan National Museum Looted These news stories are taken from various public internet sources including: http://english.ahram.…

Many of us are familiar with the ancient Egyptians’ obsession with immortality and the great efforts they made to secure the quality of their afterlife. But, as Dr. Rune Nyord shows in Yearning for Immortality: The European Invention of the Ancient Egyptian Afterlife (University of Chicago Press, 2025), even today, our understanding of the Egyptian…

I've Illegally Gone To CanadaDi Ancient & New

With Ascent to the Beautiful, William H. F. Altman completes his five-volume reconstruction of the Reading Order of the Platonic dialogues. This book covers Plato’s elementary dialogues, grappling from the start with F. D. E. Schleiermacher, who created an enduring prejudice against the works Plato wrote for beginners. Recognized in antiquity as th…

The stories that made the Ancient Egypt headlines over the third week of March The Opening of the GEM Military Commander's Tomb Found in el-Maskhuta Giza Pyramids Area Development Columns Under Khafre? These news stories are taken from various public internet sources including: http://english.ahram.org.eg/Portal/9/Heritage.aspx https://egyptianstre…

The Tropical Turn: Agricultural Innovation in the Ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean (University of California Press, 2023) chronicles the earliest histories of familiar tropical Asian crops in the ancient Middle East and the Mediterranean, from rice and cotton to citruses and cucumbers. Drawing on archaeological materials and textual source…